A Rare Book At Once Of Great

Contrary To Current Cynicism About Past Golden Ages, The Abstraction Known As 'the Intelligent Layperson' Does Exist - In The Form Of Millions Of Folks With A Passionate Commitment To Continuous Learning.

Most Impediments To Scientific Understanding Are Conceptual Locks, Not Factual Lacks. Most Difficult To Dislodge Are Those Biases That Escape Our Scrutiny Because They Seem So Obviously, Even Ineluctably, Just. We Know Ourselves Best And Tend To View Other Creatures As Mirrors Of Our Own Constitution And Social Arrangements. ( Aristotle , And Nearly Two Millennia Of Successors, Designated The Large Bee That Leads The Swarm As A King.

Something Deep Within Us Drives Accurate Messiness Into The Neat Channels Of Canonical Stories.

No Geologist Worth Anything Is Permanently Bound To A Desk Or Laboratory, But The Charming Notion That True Science Can Only Be Based On Unbiased Observation Of Nature In The Raw Is Mythology. Creative Work, In Geology And Anywhere Else, Is Interaction And Synthesis: Half-baked Ideas From A Bar Room, Rocks In The Field, Chains Of Thought From Lonely Walks, Numbers Squeezed From Rocks In A Laboratory, Numbers From A Calculator Riveted To A Desk, Fancy Equipment Usually Malfunctioning On Expensive Ships, Cheap Equipment In The Human Cranium, Arguments Before A Road Cut.

We Are Here Because One Odd Group Of Fishes Had A Peculiar Fin Anatomy That Could Transform Into Legs For Terrestrial Creatures; Because The Earth Never Froze Entirely During An Ice Age; Because A Small And Tenuous Species, Arising In Africa A Quarter Of A Million Years Ago, Has Managed, So Far, To Survive By Hook And By Crook. We May Yearn For A ‘higher Answer’– But None Exists